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157 comments on Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?
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Not this side of a century.
First you have to achieve more than breakeven, but have a plant that runs a heat engine that can produce enough energy to run the confinement aparatus.
Second you have to compete with fission, which has enough fuel to last thousands of years just for light water reactors. In breeder reactor regimes fuel costs are negligable; In spite of being more expensive and difficult to implement than light water reactors, they're still worlds simpler than any conceptual fusion power plant.
Someday I'm sure it will be useful, but in the far far future.
I was talking to Bob Hirsch, famed for his DOE paper looking at peak oil mitigation timeframes, at the ASPO conference last year. He's totally dismissive of fusion power. He should know what he's talking about seeing as his bio includes:
The reasons he gave were cost (will always be more costly than fission), complexity (always more complex than fission) and waste (although fusion doesn't produce the very long lifetime waste products hundreds of years is just as bad as 1000s in commercial terms). Though Nick's report suggests waste quantities are significantly less than fission even over relatively short time scales.
Hirsch is a fan of fission - suggesting over a 1000 years supply of fissionable material, including fast breeders which he said were cheaper and easier than fusion. Whilst not doubting fusion could/will work technically (although he did say that the current research was going in the wrong direction) his problem with is that that it'll just never be completive with fission.
On a related note I've realised a lot of older scientists who are peak oil aware are also supporters of fission as significant part of the solution. My theory for why this is the case is that many of this generation of scientists became aware of fossil fuel depletion issues in the seventies - when the atom was still highly regarded, especially amongst the scientific community. The drawbacks that have become apparent over the last 20 years were not fully recognised then and the first positive impressions of nuclear power stuck!
Thanks to CV & others
Posts like this is why I read TOD each day
Regards/And1
I think that many younger environmentalist do not realize that solutions have been identified for many of the technical problems with fission, such as proliferation, long lived wastes and runaway reactions. Their unwillingness to consider as part of our energy solution might have made sense before we understood the implications of peak oil. But now we know that fission, and especially the potential of Thorium, is just about the only good large scale energy source that will be plentiful for the next 100 years.
Maybe a review similar to the present one is in order, to cover the state of affairs regarding fission. I hear about various sorts of technology, like breeder reactors or thorium reactors or actinide burners. But how far have any of these technologies been pushed - are there working prototypes? What barriers remain to profitable use?
What always interests me is not a blank reassurance like "That problem has been solved," but rather a survey of the current research frontier. No problem is ever solved so finally that somebody somewhere isn't trying to find a better solution. For example, the waste problem. I hear some really stupid comments from folks that do not understand that the problem is rarely the danger from standing next to a radioactive source - after all, shielding is cheap. The problem is, what happens when the radioactive material gets into the air or water or soil and from there enters a person's body. Futhermore, radioactivity tends to corrode whatever material is used to contain the waste, so building a containment vessel that can last tens of thousands of years is much harder than it would be if the contents were not radioactive.
Some folks are apparently reassured by opaque promises that all the problems have been solved, or will soon be solved, or will be solved anyway by the fantastic technology that our great grandchildren will surely have developed to fix the problems we are leaving to them. I find it much more informative to learn about the current research frontier. There are surely folks around who are working to design better containment vessels for radioactive waste. What sorts of issues are they struggling with? If I know where the boundaries are, I can get a good idea of the size of the country.
Weapons proliferation is hardly a technical problem. The idea that such a problem can be "solved" is quite strange. The USA seems to be moving away from an approach of international cooperation to one of strong arm domination. For example, the recent treaty with India is quite strange. It sure looks like it is OK to develop nuclear weapons as long as you make a deal with the USA like maybe don't build a gas pipeline to Iran, or what was that deal all about anyway. "The dominant player stays strong enough to be able to impose its will on all others" - is that the kind of solution you envision?
But the problem gets really thick. If the current direction of the USA continues, where government and industry can use secret police and martial law to concentrate power and profit, then it seems unlikely that any very effective solutions for problems like waste management will get implemented. We have here a classical recipe for corruption. There are always lots of opportunities to increase profits by cutting corners and sacrificing safety.
So the big pattern I see developing is:
danger of weapons proliferation -> concentration of power -> cutting corners on safety
I would really like to see a review of the state of affairs with fission technology that addresses the issues at least at this depth.
Another issue I rarely see addressed in the realm of problems with nuclear power is the issue of mining. If fission power is hugely ramped up, mining waste and pollution issues will become correspondingly huge. As in many other such issues, there are sensible approaches that can mitigate the problems. The big question is, will these sensible approaches be implemented? Our poor past record with other energy sources, primarily those that require actual mining such as coal and tar sands, is not at all encouraging.
Not a lot of mining needed. The amount of Uranium it would take to power the country for a year would fit into a few semi trailers. Even with low grade ore, that's not a lot. Of course, without breeders, multiply that by a hudred or so, but it still isn't much, maybe one medium sized mine or so. Certainly nothing like the scale of our mining for almost any other mineral imaginable (copper, cobalt, coal, you name it).
I read some time ago about swedish trials for containing nuclear waste, IIRC they were using layers of stainless steel with a copper layer outmost, burying it a few hundred meters deep in granite in an area not prone to earthquakes. Each copper container would have it's own niche cut out in the granite surronded by a layer of clay that swells in contact with water and seals the container from groundwater, bentonite I believe has that quality. More I can't remember.
I wouldn't be surprised if Magnus Redin knew more about this particular project :)
Bait taken. :)
The containers will have an inner structure of cast iron with a bolted on lid and channels where dried used fuel elements and other highly active core components will be inserted. This iron structure provides mechanical strenght.
The inner cast iron structure will then be inserted in a 50 mm thick copper shell and a lid is friction stir welded to hermetically seal the container.
The containers are then to be stored embedded in bentonite clay that indeed swells when wet at a depth of about 500 m in crystaline bedrock. They will either be stored individually in vertical holes bored into the floor of a tunnel or several in a horisontal hole drilled between two tunnels. The later method requiers excavation of a smaller rock volume.
There has been geological research for this for about 20 years, the most intresting find is probably microbiological activity in the rock cracs.
Production methods for the inserts and copper shells have been develped, friction stir welding were better then electron beam welding. Copper forgings of this size where something new. Capsule handling have been tested and capsules with simulated decay heat stored and retrieved. A plant for filling the containers is being designed, I dont know if the design is finished.
All of the research, the interrim used fuel storage and so on is paid by fund filled by a small fee on every kWh produced. The same fund will also cover the dismantling of the reactors when they are worn out.
The research and the solution is shared with Finland who has the same kind of bedrock.
Here is a link to an official page with lots of information:
http://www.skb.se/default2____16775.aspx
The final site for the storage is decided in competition between two municipialities. Its expected that final storage will commence in 2018, this means that all the major investments in facilities will be done while the powerplants are running wich I find wise if world finance should burp. A cute bonus idea is to build a railroad with the excavated rock if it is built close to Oskarshamn.
I find this solution good enough for me, its probably overengineered.
thanks for confirming most of what I said, and for the swift reply. 500 m is pretty deep, It does seem like this scheme will keep the material safe for perhaps severel glaciations and interglacials, that is if Scandinavia will be glaciated again before the nuclides decay, who knows if the cycle is broken. I will now go back to reading "The prize".
I expect that far before the end of this century, all what we now call "nuclear waste" will be taken out and recycled. The actinides will be burnt in specially designed reactors and the remaining fissile material will be used and enriched, and only the small fraction of remaining undecayed isotopes will be returned to the storages.
And of course our kids will be amazed at the stupidity of their parents and grandparents, doing what they do now...
I expect that far before the end of this century, all what we now call "nuclear waste" will be taken out and recycled.
I beg to differ. Reprocessing of this kind has proven to be both unnecessary and uneconomical. Even burying spent fuel is not the most economical approach; it's cheaper to just seal the stuff in armored casks and guard them.
About the mining: a Japanese group, some years ago, came up with a polyamidoxime polymer (obtained basically by treating ordinary acrylic polymer with hydroxylamine in hot methanol). This polymer selectively adsorbs uranium from seawater. Suspended in the ocean in a natural current, it adsorbs 1% of its weight in uranium over a period of months, which is not bad when you consider the concentration of uranium in the water is around 3 ppb. It can then be washed with dilute acid to liberate the uranium and reused.
The group estimated the cost of the uranium obtained to be a few times the current spot market price. There would be no mining waste, since the uranium is already liberated in the enviroment, as are all the decay products like radium and radon. At their estimated cost, reprocessing and construction of breeder reactors could be delayed for centuries, even if the world goes over to mostly nuclear energy as its primary energy source.
Seawater uranium extraction deserves more attention than it has been receiving, since it could render some other large government energy research expenditures (like breeder reactors, advanced nuclear fuel cycles, or DT fusion) superfluous for the forseeable future. The primary cost of seawate extraction is the capital cost of the support structure for the adsorbant, so combining this with offshore wind might be a good idea (they could share structural elements).
This has only been market tested with aqueous methods which certainly arent low on capitial and labor and are sort of designed for plutonium extraction. Of course its been more expensive than it will ever be worth. I fully expect that utilizing pyroprocessing methods we'll at least do uranium and fission product extraction sometime this century, as long as we avoid the trap of trying to do MOX fuel nonsense. Now maybe the actinides can be burnt someday in a fast neutron reactor of some sort for profit or maybe they cant, but there is potential profit to be made with non-aqueous methods on the unburnt uranium, xenon, and fission platenoids.
And then we cant discount the political machines that make unnecissary and uneconomical things happen anyways.
And seawater uranium extraction doesnt deserve any attention at all because we'll have so much uranium from more conventional ores for it to ever compete.
I continue to disagree. As it stands right now, reprocessing would be uneconomical even if it were free. The plutonium has negative value, costing more to fabricate into fuel elements than it saves in enriched uranium. This will be true of any reactor with Pu in the fuel elements, since the cost driver (the intense alpha activity of the Pu) will be the same.
I consider homogenous reactor systems, like molten salt reactors, to be nonstarters for practical reasons. No reactor operator wants a reactor in which the entire primary loop is intensely radioactive. Nor do they want reactors that have to include sophisticated chemical processing equipment for online reprocessing.
And seawater uranium extraction doesnt deserve any attention at all because we'll have so much uranium from more conventional ores for it to ever compete.
If so, that would be another reason to not go with reprocessing or breeding.
Where did I talk about Pu?. As it stands, reprocessing just the uranium would be valuable, along with fission platenioids, xenon, and other marketable fission products. Dump the transuranic actinides seperately.
Its sure a seperate business model from LWRs. But the benifits of no fuel fabrication, low fissile load, and extremely small waste stream are there. And while fuel costs are a small component of the cost of nuclear power, they aren't negligable.
Given that MSRs have never been market tested, suggesting that they're a nonstarter because of a different business model is a bit premature.
I am glad you are open to a debate. Waste is less of a problem if you burn up all the long lived waste so that what remains has a half live of only a few hundred years. That technology has been proven. Proliferation is partially a technical problem in that some reactors and fuel cycles create more material that can be made into bombs than others. If the result mixes fissionable and non fissionable isotopes in a ratio that is not weapons grade, then the proliferator needs to build an istope separation process, which is extremely expensive and difficult. And regarding mining waste, the volume of fission fuel is very small comparded to, say, oil sands.
I am not saying that the problems have all been eliminated but that we have learned an enormous amount in some 60 years of experience. In peak oil and gas, we face a problem of enormous magnitude. Wind and solar are potentially good energy sources but they are very diffuse and intermittent. We will need to exploit every resource that we can find but we still may not avoid a catastrophe.
I would like to know what kind of proof you are talking about. I have done a little bit of googling and only turned up speculative designs.
There are two issues of course:
1) Given some complex mix of chemicals in various isotopes, one can probably devise a system to separate out the various components and then use neutron beams of the right energy or whatever to induce nuclear transformations.
2) Is there a way to do something like this but in a cost-effective way?
So I would really like to hear about working systems to eliminate long-life radioactive products from spent nuclear fuel.
Really, "proof" is a mathematical concept. It has some relevance to something like physics, less so to engineering, and almost none in the real world. A system that seems to be working on one day can turn out to be a miserable failure the next.
Sure you can do that with fast neutron incinerator reactors. A liquid chloride fast neutron reactor fed actinides and other transuranics can breed thorium into U233 for liquid fluoride reactors, or it can just dump the neutron surplus into conversion of long lived fission products into stable isotopes.
A better question though is why bother? These things are pretty easily contained and monitored over at least a century, and one can very reasonably assume we'll have better techniques for managing waste by then. Chemical waste is toxic forever, but we dont have giant programs to convert lead into iron.
We'll do it if it makes sense, and if not, just stick it in an empty lot.
You haven't looked very hard.
Take fuel rods, melt them down, mix with liquid salt. Put in an electrode, run current, pull out a giant lump of metal. This is all the actinides. Melt down, make new fuel rods, you're done. Pour the salt into a drum, seal it, come back in 300 years and it's not dangerous anymore. Simple, easy, hardly the rocket science that the eco-dweebs would have you believe.
The only complication is that after you do this a few times, the resulting fuel needs to go into a fast breeder reactor, because thermal neutrons won't fission some of the heavy actinides. That being said, breeders are an old hat, the French had one going in the 1970s (superphenix), but it closed in 1995. That is hardly the only breeder reactor around.
In any case, it was eventually closed because eco-terrorists hated it (even fired rockets at it), god forbid we get a reliable and non-polluting source of power, don't you know, and because it was pretty costly. It didn't make much sense in an age of cheap uranium, but it was hardly a technical difficulty even using 1970s technology.
In any case, these various technologies are stupidly simple, a fission reactor is little more than a big pile of metal with some pipes for heating water, and they've been proven a hundred times over through the course of the last 40 years or so.
The issue with this is that there isn't much research to do with fission. Most of the research is related to making fuel rods that can last a really long time between changes, as that saves money and is a pretty hard problem. Beyond that, reactors were easy even in 1960, it's just a very simple technology. All the current reactor designs floated around, there's not the slightest chance that they won't work exactly as expected, modulo cost overruns in the construction, and excessive maintainance costs. There just isn't much research to do here, all the problems are solved, and none of them were hard to begin with.
1) Waste management. The industry doesn't really care much, because handling any volume of waste just isn't that expensive, but if you care, google pyrometalurgy for a better way to do it. There's not the slightest chance this won't work exactly as advertized, it's been tested and everything. The only question is, how cheap will it be, and why bother. I think we should bother, but I'm not calling the shots. It makes the waste safe in about 300 years (as compared to 100 or 200 for a fusion reactor). Most reprocessing has historically been done with PUREX, as that's what the military used to make weapons, so why not use the same process? Once again, it works, and no civilian systems are terribly concerned with reprocessing waste, so why bother.
2) Breeder reactors. This was an old hat in the 1960s, look up superphenix. They cost more though, so people never bothered, because Uranium is cheap. Some were built, and run for decades, the environmentalists always hated them, they were generally shut down because Uranium is cheap, so what's the point.
3) Proliferation. The US is already a nuclear power, I can't fathom how us using more nuclear power allows bangladesh to get nukes.
The nuclear industry had a decades long record of arrogance, overconfidence, lies and secrecy. Not to mention a series of very serious disasters which were 'impossible' (Windscale, Chernobyl, TMI) and a legacy of radioactive waste and sites which will take decades or centuries to deal with (most notably on the military side, of course).
Which is not to say that big improvements haven't been made, eg in US reactor operation and safety post the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster. Or that in an age where global warming is the greatest threat, that it doesn't have a role.
It was an industry conceived in an age of great techno-optimism, when it was inconceivable that human action could permanently degrade the environment, and the opportunities for human progress were endless. Massive government subsidies were poured in to bring the industry to life.
Today we are vastly more cognisant of the risks of unintended consequences, of the biases of large government agencies and government-industrial complexes, and of the tendencies towards secrecy and denial of large bureaucracies.
In a curious mirror of global warming, we don't trust authorities as much any more. Just as people are not willing to trust any number of authoritative scientists on the reality of global warming, so they are not willing to trust scientists and engineers on the safety and efficacy of nuclear power.
Call it a post modern age. We no longer believe that there are truths, separate from their societal and social context and meanings. It is argued that global warming is a giant conspiracy by scientists to enhance their own position and funding, and weaken the United States. That is an argument entirely founded on views about how society works as a social and political construct.
This, above all, a group of French philosophers has left us with as a view of the world.
I have always felt that it was ridiculous to place power metals in a deep mine and predict that it won't be touched for geologic ages. Its no different than locking up the Pharaohs gold in a Pyramid. For eternity.
The real problem with actinide stores is that some men will eventually purposely mine it to obtain the power metals.
Reprocessing and burning up the actinides is the only way to insure that there is nothing in the waste depository that anyone would want.
Although today I understand that archaeologists actually open the ancient cesspools to explore the diets by inspecting the fecal remains. So to say even that won't happen is still unpredictable.
Bu the the attraction of going after power fissionables will ensure that man WILL disturb the waste depositary.
I don't think we will continue to use fission long term, after Fusion becomes practical, but some facilities will eventually be created to specifically consume the power actinides and remove them forever.
I used to be very much against fission reactors because of safety concerns. I wouldn't make that argument any longer because of the safety record of fission reactors. If we vastly expanded their use, there would be very serious accidents, but there is not a single technology which is perfectly safe and has a clean environmental bill. So it becomes a judgement call. That is a call we have to make collectively.
I do see a very problematic future for fission because of local politics, though, after all, who in their right mind wants one of these next door, even if the risks are small and understood? Moreover, federal politics has shown to be incapable of supplying fission technology with the needed regulatory framework and long term infrastructure for re-processing and fuel re-cycling for breeders. Thorium reactors might be a way out, but they seem to have a couple of decades of R&D ahead, still.
And finally... until the total cost of fission including waste storage is known, we can only assume that electricity from reactors is not significantly cheaper than electricity from renewables. But this would probably change if waste heat recycling (for industrial processes and heating) could be included into the equation. I don't know how serious R&D efforts in the US are to look into that, though.
The cost of waste storage is nearly all upfront. The rest is nearly zero because of discounting; Now the cost of geologic repositories might be huge, but they're political objects that are entirely unnecissary. Just store the waste in an empty lot for the next century and revisit the issue again. There will probably even be a market for it with all the unused fuel and fission platenoids in it.
Right. Let your great-grandkids clean up after you.
I want my MTV!
Sure, just like we're dealing with the massive social ills caused by the lead pipes of the Roman empire.
Right. Let your great-grandkids clean up after you.
Right, do unnecessary work now and let your great-grandkids clean up the incurred public debt.
The 'economic pollution' of unnecessary government spending is a worse problem than the nominal cost imposed on future generations by interim storage of spent nuclear fuel.
Conventional reactors can also be retrofitted to breed/convert thorium to uranium. I worked on the successful thorium light water breeder reactor project back in the late 1970's. The Canadian CANDU reactor also offers lots of possibilities for using thorium and for minimizing long-lived nuclear waste. We have the technology. We just need to have realistic economic incentives against generating both CO2 from fossil fuels and long lived nuclear waste from conventional reactors. See www.thoriumpower.com for some more info on one thorium fuel cycle approach.
The problem is with any breeding configuration in solid fuel reactors that implies an entirely seperate reprocessing and fuel fabrication regime that has to deal with fairly hot fuel elements, unlike fresh uranium before it gets stuck in the reactor. This vastly magnifies cost and probably isnt worth it. We're more likely to reap benefits from fluid fuel reactors or once through light water reactors.
Now reprocessing with molten salts might offer some advantages, but all large scale reprocessing plants today use aqueous methods which are just in every way horrible. They are ideal for doing plutonium extraction for weapons production, but not so much for reactor fuel.
One good thing with small and medium size liquid fuel reactors that run at a high temperature is that they can deliver both thermally manufactured hydrogen and hot process steam to oil refineries. That ought to be a good way to make heavy oil and old refinery infrastructure last longer.
The problem is with any breeding configuration in solid fuel reactors that implies an entirely seperate reprocessing and fuel fabrication
This omits the possibility of a system that could breed and consume fuel in-situ, without reprocessing. This would require fuel elements capable of achieving high burnup, but metal fuel elements have that property.
The problem would be keeping the reactivity within bounds as the fuel evolved. This could be done either by careful and frequent rearrangement of discrete fuel elements (a thorium-uranium near-breeding scheme in CANDU did this) or by use of an accelerator-driven reactor that can continue to operate as k declines (just turn up the accelerator; time share the beam between multiple cores so the accelerator's capacity remains fully utilized.)